


Yes.

by DaisyNinjaGirl



Category: Mansfield Park (1999), Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
Genre: AU: Canon divergence, Character Study, Every Family is Happy in its Own Way, F/F, F/M, Teasing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 14:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18918802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaisyNinjaGirl/pseuds/DaisyNinjaGirl
Summary: A conversation at breakfast.Notes: In this AU, Henry manages to keep it together long enough for Maria Rushworth to run off with Mr Yates instead.  The characterisation is a mashup of the 1999 adaptation starring Frances O’Connor and elements from the novel (like Fanny’s brother William.)  The F/F relationship is one sided teasing, consistent with the 1999 movie adaptation.





	Yes.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ultra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ultra/gifts).



Fanny stood at the window of her high room, naked but for her white chemise, gazing out at the good green country side.  She opened the window and supported herself on the sill while she breathed the pure English air and listened to the beginnings of the day in that fine house: chirping birds, the quiet scuffling of housemaids moving through the halls, the rattle of horse and cart.

After too little a time, her maid entered, and they began the complicated business of fitting her into a properly laced corset and set of petticoats, each layer making her more fully a proper lady, the bell like skirts filling the space around her.

“A sail!  A sail!” her husband cried, admiring her from the doorway of her dressing room.

She turned and smiled, her eyes creasing.  The carriage noise she had heard was not the baker but in fact her husband, returned a day earlier than looked for, and before breakfast to boot.  He shooed her maid away, and picked up the heavy velvet of her skirt and jacket in his own hands to drape her in.  He rummaged through her jewel box and produced an amber cross on a simple gold chain, rubbing its companion piece, a more prettily worked chain between his fingers, before placing it around the soft skin of his wife's neck. “There.  My beloved Fanny.  I have a surprise waiting for you down below.  A sail, indeed.”  He drew her inexorably towards the stairs, his thumb rubbing possessively on her palm.  “Have I not done well for you, Fanny Price, have I not?”

“Fanny Crawford, as you very well know,” she admonished.

Henry grinned in triumph, and gestured at those already settled in the breakfast room.  Fanny shrieked and clattered into the room.  Her sister-in-law Mary, a happy spinster there on a prolonged visit, had taken great joy in the lavishness of the new styles, and was bedecked in enormous puffed sleeves in a gown of turkey red, with hat and feathers to match; just as Fanny's brother, her William, the unexpected guest, was sober in his blue coat and pristine white collar.

“Our William is a new minted Admiral of the Blue—in the Rear,” Henry announced, before ever Fanny’s brother could get his mouth open to announce the news.  “I have brought him to you before even the Gazette might know of it, and I am insufferably proud of myself for arranging the matter.”

“As opposed to Admiral Price winning the odd sea battle, a little here and there, you mean?” Mary asked.  William chuckled at her in good nature.

“We will be holding a grand dinner in honour of your promotion, Admiral Price,” Henry said comfortably.  “As soon as ever I may send out the invitations to my neighbours.”

“For which you will want to be thanked appropriately,” William said with a smile.  “And I thank you now, for your influence on my behalf.”

“Oh, I am a great improver of Prices.”

“For which improvements we may take no pride in ourselves?” Fanny asked.

“For which you provide the raw material, and I, I provide the sculptor's hands.”

“Come, Galatea,” William said to his sister's frown.  “The Crawfords ever like to be flattered, it keeps them amused and costs us little.”

“I will make amends, dearest Fanny.”  Henry flung himself to his knees beside her chair.  “I shall abject myself until I have restored your good opinion of me.  ‘The sculptor’s hand can only break the spell / To free the figures slumbering in the stone’” he said, hand on heart.

“I know you very well, Henry, you are a panderer to others’ good opinion of you.”

"I am guilty, guilty.  But credit me this, beloved Fanny, I have the good taste to find a worthwhile soul to impress."

“Oh, I agree,” Mary said.  “We used to inhabit rather more sordid social circles.  Good heavens, how much differently do you think we would have turned out if we had kept in with the Melbourne House set and the Admiral's beloved Rears and Vices: we had several invitations to dine with Caro Lamb and her husband—whose tastes were peculiar—that I turned down.”  She tapped Fanny on the wrist with two fingers.  “Do you know, when poor Tom was so ill all those years ago, I almost wrote you a letter asking if all hope was lost, I almost did; such an interested desire in matrimonial aims would have been as nothing to some of the souls I kept company with at the time.  But Fanny, I kept thinking of your disapproving eyes and burned my paper instead.  I actually was glad when I learned that Tom had regained his strength, no one more surprised than myself.  And so it continues to my horror—last week, I even found myself visiting the poor.”

“Oh Mary,” Henry said in mock horror.

“In fact,” Fanny said, “we have been visiting your tenants and we both liked it very well.  The little girls were in heaven over Mary’s lace handkerchiefs and silk gown, and the little boys puffed out their chests and bloodied each other’s noses for the right to run errands for her.  Sin that amends is patched with virtue, as the fool says.”

“And there is no true cuckold but calamity,” Henry capped her quotation.  “Ah, Fortune, fickle mistress that you are, sending my wife and sister out into the humble cottages of my tenantry. ‘That child seems to me to be the equal of the Gods, sitting next to you, hearing your sweet laugh.’  But here I am, paler than grass.”

“I am glad you have endured it, for now they are returned to you,” William said. 

Henry, fashionable fribble that he was, caught Fanny’s eye and winked.  Then he turned to her brother, and in the voice he used when he chose to be provocative challenged the Admiral: “I hear you are to be posted into the Mediterranean when next you sail, William.  Do you get my wife some poetry, for she is draped in all the crosses you may furnish her already, and I hear the island of Sappho is well stocked in lyric verse.”

William coughed.  “The islands of Greece are rich with history.  I dare say I may venture to find some volumes or two for a happily married couple, until you Crawfords find worlds enough and time to visit there, good Henry.”

“Well,” Mary said with languid ease, “Fanny and I have been undertaking a course of improving reading.  I am only too happy to include your favourite poet in our programme.”

“I’m a jealous man,” Henry cried.  “The only person who will read love poetry to my wife is myself.  Not, that is, that I should have any objection in the event of my tragic and untimely death to my beloved wife and sister setting up house together and mourning me together.  Like twin Patiences on a monument, smiling at grief.”

“It would be a very suitable arrangement,” William said wisely.

“You all think I don't know what you’re talking about,” Fanny said primly over her teacup, the corners of her mouth turning up, “but I do.  Edmund and I were very well read.”

Henry chuckled and, standing behind her, caressed her cheek.  “My darling wife.  But only,” he cautioned, fixing his sister with a steely gaze, “after I am gone.”

“Edmund was an excellent clergyman for making love to,” Mary added wistfully.  “And now I hear that his wife is preparing for yet _another_ lying in, patient soul.  Did you see anyone from Mansfield when you were in London?  Is there news of them?”

“Tom was there, to take his seat, and very busy and dependable with it all.  They are blessed with another girl,” Henry told them.  William spoke then on a matter of politics and the conversation wandered down other by-ways.

“Poor old Fanny,” Mary said, sitting next to her and pressing her hand.  “You do still have a tendre for our Edmund, I know.”

Fanny made herself smile.  “It is of no moment, or at least what is not will trouble me for no longer than that moment.  Edmund was _so_ kind to me you see; my protector when I had nobody and was all alone in that great grand house.  But I think…” she hesitated.

“Go on,” Mary said.

“I think it was an absent-minded kindness.  A youth almost ready for Oxford who could spare a thought for his little frail child-cousin, but might forget about her in an instant if some new business came along.  Steadfastness patched with distraction.  Forgive me, I did not think so when first you and I met: I was quite heartbroken with his attentions to you, and too desperately shy to acknowledge it.  And he makes an excellent parson.”

“And in fact quite forgot the pair of us together the day he met the virtuous maid Elizabeth.  Who is very good,” Mary twinkled, “but I think that _I_ should have made the superior parson's wife.”

“What’s this?” Henry had overheard the tail end of their conversation.  “My sister who despises to visit the poor a _parson's_ wife?”

“I have the riddle,” William said.  “For sin that’s patched with virtue has the memory of it, and a little piece of compassion for those who still stray.”

“ _There_ ,” Mary said triumphantly, “ _one_ of my brothers can take the measure of me.”

***

Later that day, the four of them took a stroll about the grounds of Everingham.  William and Mary had drifted ahead, where the two entertained each other with epigrams and peals of laughter.  Henry stayed behind and quietly regaled his wife with his latest adventures in London, and little pieces of homely wanted news about their two children, lately visited at school, and Susan, now married and residing in Richmond.

Fanny breathed deeply and leaned on the comforting support of her husband’s arm as they walked.  Above them, great flocks of starlings swept through the vast sky, and from the little rise of their property Fanny could see not just the park of Everingham but the latticework waterways of the Broads and the boundary edge of the cliffs that fronted onto the sea.  Here she had lived for twenty years, in a house both larger and smaller than those she had been raised to; here, she had grown big enough to fill the green space that lay beyond her fantasies.

“However do you put up with a retired sinner like me,” Henry said as they walked, his thumb familiarly rubbing her fingers with his hand.

Fanny turned and looked with clear eyes in the pure English air at her facile, friendly husband who had never, for all his cravings for praise, asked anything from her but honesty.  “If you ever strayed, you made sure I didn’t find out about it,” she said plainly, the corners of her mouth turning up as he cackled with glee.  She looked up from under her eye lashes.  “And you’re a jealous man who cares who reads me poetry.  At least while you yet live.”

Henry swept her up in her arms and spun her around and about, as giddy in love as the first day she had said yes to him, high on stone ramparts above the sea.  From such unlikely things a marriage could be won.  “Yes,” she said. "Yes."

**Author's Note:**

> \- a lot of the quoting is coming out of assorted Shakespeare plays, especially _Twelfth Night_ , because one of the things that I like about Henry (and the canonical Fanny likes) is that he is good at dramatic reading.  
> \- the quote about the sculpture starts off with Pygmalion and Galatea, then moves onto Michelangelo’s opinion about his work: “I just carve away all the bits that don’t look like the statue” (to paraphrase)  
> \- “That child seems to me to be the equal of the Gods, sitting next to you, hearing your sweet laugh” is a paraphrase from Sappho 31, one of the best known works of Sappho, the poet of Lesbos. She’s perhaps best known in the 21st century for writing in praise of love between women, but she was also known to archaic Greeks as The Poetess for her metrically clever verse and intensely passionate, personal point of view. In the early 19th C, a number of commentators were tying themselves in knots trying to put some plausible deniability on the whole “being in love with a woman” thing. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sappho  
> \- "for she is draped in all the crosses you may furnish her" - in the book, but not in every adaptation, there's a bit of subplot about an amber cross that William gives Fanny, and whether Fanny will wear it on a chain given her by the Crawfords or Edmund.  
> \- I’ve been doing a lot of watching “how to get dressed in X periods” because, you know, relaxing, which has fed into this story a bit. The style adopted immediately after the Regency passion for Empire-line gowns was really bonkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puQfI4eXGoE&t=339s (Both Prior Attire and CrowsEyeProductions are very good.) I couldn’t find a graceful way to put this in the story, but in my head, Henry is wearing Very Loud tartan trousers which he is excessively pleased with.


End file.
